
/re 




(I.LSS I E L -'Jdlli 



Hi ink 



P* 



i j iv'i:sK.\u:i) by 






\ 



DISCOURSES 

ON 

INTEMPERANCE, 

PREACHED IN THE CHURCH IN 

BRATTLE SQUARE, BOSTON, APRIL 5, 1827, 

THE DAY OF ANNUAL FAST, 

AND APRIL 8, 

THE LORD'S DAY FOLLOWING. 



BY JOHM G/PALFREY, A. M. 

Pastor of the Church in Brattle Square. 



NATHAN HALE, CONGRESS STREET. 

1827. 



T3 



Some of the statements in the following pages 
are derived from the documents of the Massachu- 
setts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, 
and others from various sources. The sermons were 
prepared in the course of an interrupted week, and 
are faulty in many respects. But the author has no 
time to correct them, and if they are capable of 
doing any thing to open the eyes of the publick to 
the tremendous scourge under which it is suffering, 
he would not withhold them, from any sensibility to 
criticism. If there are any over-statements, he will 
be most heartily glad to see them disproved. 



Printed by William L. Lewis, 

No. 3, Suffolk Buildings, Congress Street. 

Gift 
Mrs. Hennen Jennings 
Apll 26, 1933 



DISCOURSES. 



JEREMIAH vi. 8. 
Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from 
thee j lest I make thee desolate, a land not inhabited. 



The piety of our ancestors has trans- 
mitted to us the usage of assembling year 
by year, at the opening of the season, to 
seek, with prayer and fasting, a blessing from 
the God of harvest. Elsewhere, such so- 
lemnities are considered as appropriate to 
occasions of great publick distress, and a 
stranger coming among us, might ask what 
reason of this kind we could have for observ- 
ing it. He had found, he would say, a nu- 
merous people, living on a bountiful soil, in 
a temperate climate, with every thing called 
for by the reasonable wishes of man, within 
the reach of their industry ; with a free and 



at the same time well established govern- 
ment, relations of extended and profitable 
intercourse abroad, and the rights of per- 
son and reputation, property and conscience 
protected by equal laws and just magistrates 
at home. He had heard of no interruption 
of any of the channels of publick prosperity; 
no intestine broil, nor wide devastation of 
flood or fire, storm or earthquake ; no fam- 
ine, pestilence, nor war. 

Tiie observation, however, would be su- 
perficial, and the inference groundless. If 
seasons of publick distress and peril call for 
publick fasting, humiliation and prayer, we 
have cause to keep a fast this day. It is 
truly a day for a reflecting man to ' afflict his 
soul,' to ' bow down his head as a bulrush, 
and spread sackcloth and ashes under him.' 
Not less than ten thousand citizens of this 
nation, as there is good reason to believe, 
have fallen during the year now past, vic- 
tims to one mortal scourge, prematurely cut 
off, cut off in the midst of their days. 



They did not die by pestilence. How 
happy if they had ! Their sufferings then 
would have been short and innocent. They 
did not fall by the sword. Their bones 
might have been worthy then to repose in 
the fair soil they had defended, by their fa- 
thers' graves which they had kept sacred 
from an invader's footstep. They did not 
waste away in the lingering torments of 
starvation. O how much less heart-wiing- 
ing would then have been the sorrow that 
burst in long stifled sobs by their last home. 
They died by self-administered poison ; by 
that cup of guilty excess, compared with 
which war, famine and pestilence, are merci- 
ful plagues. Famine % Should we hear 
of one tenth part, one hundredth part, of ten 
thousand persons likely to perish of hunger, 
we should be possessed with horrour by an 
event so unprecedented, and the whole coun- 
try would be subsidized for their relief. 
Pestilence °l The most awful visitation of 



that kind ever known in our nation,* one 
which made the ears of all that heard of it 
to tingle, one of those fearful providences 
that come at long intervals from one another, 
did not extend its ravages beyond one city, 
and was content with less than four thousand 
victims. War 9 Our last war was not 
reckoned a comparatively bloodless one ; but, 
in the three years it lasted, the sword de- 
voured in our armies considerably less than 
five hundred in a yearyf while in a time of 
profound tranquillity, another destroyer takes 
from us two hundred in a week, and this 
great mortality is almost unobserved. To 
the other great scourges of communities, 
there is commonly a speedy end. When 
the hardships of war become intolerable, 
peace on some terms is made, and the 

* The yellow fever in Philadelphia at 1793. 

t According to Niles' Register, there fell in our 

armies 495 in the campaign of 1812, 

422 " " 1813, 

505 " " 1814. 



hearts of the afflicted people revive. If our 
borders had been wasted in the past year by 
epidemick sickness or scarcity, we should 
now 7 be looking and praying with good hope 
for a healthy and abundant season. But 
who sees any reason to expect, that fewer 
will perish this year by the slow suicide of 
guilty excess, than perished the last °l What 
has been done to avert the same fate, from 
at least an equal number 9 Rather, what 
is not already done to ensure it *? The 
habits are formed, — -formed, with many 
thousands of our countrymen, which with 
moral certainty will bring them to this end. 
Some thousands will not reach it till the 
next, or a following year, but other thousands 
are riper for destruction, and they will find 
it in this. They are already close to the 
precipice, and every hour they rush to- 
wards it with a madder speed. Can they 
not be arrested °l Try it ; try it with all 
the force and tenderness of pity ; but who 
is so inexperienced as to flatter himself that 



8 

one will be saved, for hundreds whose res- 
cue will be attempted in vain ? Shall not the 
food of their destructive appetite be denied °l 
On the contrary, lavish provision has been 
made and is making for it, by the industry of 
the nation exerted abroad and at home. In 
town and country, from sea to wilderness, 
and from the northern border to the south, 
the processes are uninterruptedly going on, 
which extract this bane of human life from 
the generous fruits that nature yields for its 
support ; and every wind from the ocean 
adds to the supply a contribution from for- 
eign shores. The result of one calculation 
which has been made publick, is, that one 
eighth part of the commerce of this port is 
engaged in the conveyance of spirituous 
liquors, or of the means of making them. 
There can be no doubt, I trust, that this is 
excessive, but from such examination as I 
have been able to make, I infer that not far 
from one twelfth part of our imports, not re- 



exported, consists of that commodity and 
the materials for its manufacture.* 

We speak of ten thousand premature 
deaths directly produced by intemperance. 
But how ill does this represent the magni- 
tude of the evil. Look at it more nearly, 

* On examining this point more carefully, I am led 
to think that the calculation to which I have first re- 
ferred is not so wide of the truth as I had suppos- 
ed. The amount of imports into the port of Boston 
in the year ending October 1826, was #14,246,582. 
The amount re-exported I do not know, but suppos- 
ing it to have been the same in proportion as in the 
country at large, property to the amount of about 
$7,000,000 only remained for consumption. In the 
same year, the amount imported of spirits produced 
from grain was #292,623, of molasses, $511^624, and 
of brandy, supposing it to have been in proportion to 
the importation of this commodity in the country at 
large about $75,000, making a total of #887,247. 
Of this, on the same supposition, there were exported 
domestick spirits amounting to about $50,000, or 
$25,000 worth of molasses, and foreign spirits amount- 
ing to about #50,000, which would leave #812,247 
worth for consumption, considerably over one ninth 
part of the amount of imports not re-exported. 



10 

and see what kind of death it was. Each 
of those persons once was as capable of hap- 
piness, and perhaps looked for happiness as 
confidently as any one of us. How bitter 
was the remorse, how painful were the 
struggles of many when they first perceived 
themselves to be entangled in the ruinous 
habit. What stern self-upbraidings did they 
not utter, what overwhelming self-contempt 
did they not feel, when they first began to 
think of their bright prospects overcast, their 
fair name blighted, by the pernicious indul- 
gence. Who can picture the fearful pro- 
cess of feeling they passed through from the 
time when they began to experience their in- 
constant resistance to be vain, to that when 
in transient intervals of sobriety, they saw 
themselves surrendered, soul and body, to 
the bondage of the omnipotent sin 9 Many 
in the course of their fall, having wasted 
their substance with riotous living, sustained 
their last days on the coarse bread of pub- 
lick charity. A large proportion exchanged 



11 

die dignity and comfort of a decent dwell- 
ing for a jail. Not a few endured those 
wrenches of the mind which precede and 
end in fatuity and phrensy. All suffered in 
some one of the most loathsome forms, the 
feebleness and torments of bodily disease.* 
And for all who had sanity to reflect, how 
must they have shuddered, as they drew 
near their unlamented end, in recalling 
that emphatick scripture which declares that 
drunkards shall not inherit the kingdom of 
God. The expression is awfully peremp- 
tory. But who that considers the spiritual 
nature of the heavenly happiness, in connex- 
ion with the capacities of enjoyment of that 

* * A train of complaints of the most dangerous 
nature, at once destroying the body and depraving 
the mind, are the certain followers of habitual 
ebriety. Amidst all the evils of human life, no cause 
of disease has so wide range, or so large a share, 
as the use of spirituous liquors. * * * * More 
than one half of all the sudden deaths which happen, 
are in a fit of intoxication.' — Trotter's Essay, p. 137. 
Boston Edition. 



12 

being whose work on earth has been to 
sink the human nature in the brute, who, 
thus reflecting, can be at a loss to justify it, 
in all its comprehensiveness and force 1 

What a tragical tale would be told, if one 
such history could be written out at length. 
x\nd yet to apprehend the mass of such 
misery which really exists, we must repre- 
sent it to ourselves as repeated among us 
many thousands of times within a year. As to 
the extremity of the evil in each case where 
it occurs, no one who has any experience or 
imagination, needs or can be assisted by 
the descriptions of others to estimate it. Its 
extent, I apprehend, is less understood, and 
to establish this, I am to offer some statements 
which must needs be of a particular and 
homely kind. They will not on that ac- 
count be the less in place, if they serve at 
all to illustrate the subject. 

I have stated the number of persons who 
yearly perish in these states by the direct 
effects of intemperance at ten thousand. 



is 

This was the number according to one cal- 
culation, six years ago, when our popula- 
tion was much smaller, and the vice less 
common, and though the estimate was prob- 
ably at that time exorbitant, I greatly fear 
that it might now be found to fall considera- 
bly within the truth. The year before, the 
bill of mortality of one of the most ex- 
emplarily moral of our large towns, (I speak 
of the town of Salem,) recorded twenty 
deaths out of a hundred and eighty-one, 
one ninth part, to have been produced di- 
rectly by intemperance ; and the remark is 
added, ' many who are included in the 
consumption list, might be added to die 
deaths by intemperance, because it is ascer- 
tained, that habits of intemperance have 
produced various diseases, which have ter- 
minated in apparent consumption.' If the 
proportion of twenty in a hundred and 
eighty-one, the proportion of that orderly 
town, had been maintained throughout the 
country, intemperance would have been the 



14 

direct cause, that year, of the death of 
nearly thirty thousand citizens. In the 
same year, it was stated, on the authority 
of the bills of mortality, that the annual 
average of deaths from intoxication, in this 
state, was six hundred and sixty-six. If the 
proportion of drunkards to the whole popu- 
lation be taken to be throughout the union, 
the same as in this state, whereas in fact it 
is probably considerably greater, it would 
follow that more than thirteen thousand citi- 
zens of this nation, yearly fell victims to 
drunkenness, as long ago as 1821. Three 
years before, from data which seem to have 
been accurate, as far as they went, it had 
been computed, that intemperance was the 
remote or proximate cause of the death 
of about three persons yearly, in a popula- 
tion of a thousand* ; according to which es- 

* In Portsmouth, 21 persons died by excess in 
drinking last year. This place had at the last census 
a population of 7,327. New-Haven had by the same 
census, 8,327 inhabitants. The Medical Association 



15 

timate, the number of persons whose lives 
are thus more or less directly sacrificed, 
would be every year., in this state, eighteen 
hundred, and in the United States thirty- 
six thousand. When we attend to the sup- 
ply provided for this use, we shall see cause 
to admit that the calculation is not much, if 
at all, exaggerated. The consumption of 
foreign spirituous liquors, was in the year 
1823, more than four and a half millions of 
gallons, and in the year 1824, more than 
five millions. The average yearly amount 
of foreign spirits consumed for ten years 
preceding 1812, was nearly seven millions 
of gallons.f The use of them, however, 

of that city, in a late publication, say ; c on referring 
to the list of deaths in this town during the year 1826, 
we find that of the 94 persons over 20 years of age, 
more than one third were, in our opinion, caused or 
hastened, directly, or indirectly, by intemperance ; 
and on referring further back, we find a similar pro- 
portion imputable to the same cause for the two years 
preceding.' 

t Seybert's Statistical Annals, p. 463, 



16 



had been already in great part superseded 
by those of domestick manufacture. In 
1810, according to the census then made 
by the marshals, the quantity thus produced 
from domestick and foreign materials, was 
nearly twenty-six millions of gallons, * of 
which six hundred thousand were exported, 
leaving more than twenty-five millions for 
the consumption of the country ;f to which, 
if the above named average amount of the 
foreign commodity be added, it appears that 
an average quantity of more than four gal- 
lons was consumed in a year, by every man, 
woman and child in the nation, the slave 
population included. I am not aware that 
any similar report to that, on which these 
calculations are founded, has been since 
made. It is thought that the annual con- 
sumption of ardent spirits cannot now 
amount to less than forty-five millions of 
gallons, J which, reckoning the drinking 

* lb. t lb. 

\ This would feed the Middlesex canal to a distance 
of 15 1-6 miles, or the Erie canal 3 8 1-3 miles. 



17 

population at a million of persons, would 
give them individually, an average allowance 
of a pint of liquid poison in a day. With 
such a consumption we could not, in any 
reason, look for consequences less distress- 
ing than we witness. If, of this number, we 
suppose that more than two thirds permit 
themselves only that indulgence which is 
reckoned moderate, and considerably less 
than one third drink to that excess which 
brands them as decidedly intemperate per- 
sons, we have then, in the nation, three hun- 
dred thousand of the latter class, in some 
stage of their progress ; an estimate which I 
am disposed to think not far from the truth, 
and almost certainly not beyond it. We 
come to a similar result by a different method 
of calculation. If for the ten thousand who 
die yearly by the direct effect of intemper- 
ance, there be twice as many more of such 
as either, in consequence, fall victims to 
some one of the various diseases to which it 
predisposes, or, being intemperate, are from 



18 

causes independent of their vice, arrested by 
some one in the variety of mortal diseases, 
we have then a yearly mortality of thirty 
thousand intemperate persons, a result be» 
low, but not far from that of the computa- 
tion which I mentioned before, as founded 
on the assumption of intemperance being 
the remote or proximate cause of three 
deaths yearly, in a population ot a thousand. 
And supposing ten years to be the average 
term of life, after habits of excess are fix- 
ed, (a favourable supposition, it is true, for 
this is an evil work, against which, ven- 
geance is commonly executed speedily,) it 
would then follow, that there are three hun- 
dred thousand inebriates living in thks coun- 
try at a time, the same result as appeared 
from the other method of calculation. 

But the deplorable -misery which the 
drunkard feels is by no means all that he 
inflicts. Most men belong to families. Al- 
most all men at first have friends. How 
does the heart of friendship bleed, when it 



19 

sees the object of its regard wedding him- 
self to utter ruin, for this world, and the 
world to come. What moving remonstran- 
ces are uttered, how hard to bear the 
alternations of timid hope and cruel dis- 
appointment, as promises of reformation are 
successively made and broken. But friend- 
ship, if it will, can be inconstant, when its 
object is unworthy, and go elsewhere for 
consolation. Not so with domestick love. 
What pangs rend brothers' and sisters' hearts 
when one of a once united family is seen 
going thus astray. With what agonizing solici- 
tude does parental affection watch the child, 
whom idleness or bad company has enticed 
into the destroyer's paths. With what soul- 
absorbing earnestness are all methods of 
amendment tried, and when they fail, what 
mingled shame and anguish bow down the 
hoary head. Worst of all, when the deadly 
fascination has fastened on them whom prov- 
idence has set to rule in the domestick 
sphere. The husband and father, fatigued 



20 



with his labour, or perplexed with his cares, 
or perhaps from the mere excitement of 
prosperity, or in the hearty greeting of hos- 
pitality, is observed to give in to indigencies 
which excite at first only occasional alarm. 
By and by his spirits appear disturbed, and 
his temper unequal. The meek assiduities of 
conjugal affection are sometimes rudely re- 
pulsed, and his children hesitate to greet his 
return with their once always welcome ca- 
resses, doubtful whether it is with a maudlin 
tenderness, or a terrifying severity, that 
they are to be met. His habits of regular 
industry are not maintained ; employment 
does not seek him as it has done ; and be- 
fore long, it appears that his affairs are em- 
barrassed, and provision for the wants of his 
household is not punctually made. Morti- 
fied at the change which he sees at his 
home, he absents himself from it more and 
more. The alternative is the society of 
the tippling house, from which the wakeful 
wife awaits him night after night to receive 



21 

his insults, if he shall stagger home an angry 
brute, or busy herself to restore him to con- 
sciousness, if he shall be conveyed home a 
senseless load. There is, probably, not a 
day in which tliis scene is not acted, in 
thousands of the dwellings of this happy 
country. He wakes in the morning from 
his deep sleep, to feel a sick craving which 
must be relieved at the accustomed haunt, 
and if he be of that largest class, w T hose 
daily industry should provide their daily 
bread, she who has w T atched and wept by 
him till the dawn, awaits his departure, to 
apply herself to the feeble and sorrowful 
labour which must buy her little ones food, 
if indeed she shall be able to conceal it from 
their tyrant to devote it to that use. A 
common end of all this is, that the decent 
dwelling of industry and content having by 
degrees sustained the changes that convert 
it into the rueful abode of want, its scanty 
furniture is sold to pay the tavern score, 
and its once happy tenants join the number 



22 

of similarly ill-fated persons in the alms- 
house. To those families, which the bounty 
of providence has placed above such con- 
sequences of vice in their head, still some 
portion of the curse of the drunkard, that he 
shall come to poverty, is apt to cling ; and 
in such, the sufferings of the mind too, are 
for the most part, felt with peculiar keen- 
ness. All alike are exposed to the distress 
and disgrace of follies and crimes committed 
by the drunkard in paroxysms of his mad- 
ness, and all alike suffer the mischiefs of a 
depraving example, and the loss of that 
respectability, that instruction, that aid in all 
ways, spiritual, intellectual, and temporal, 
which a family has n right to expect to derive 
from its head."* There is one case, if possi- 

* Dr. Rush (Inquiry p. 8.) appears to think that a 
tendency to intemperance is transmitted in families, 
not only by example, but by physical laws. Dr. 
Trotter in his learned Essay, Medical, Philosophical, 
and Chemical, on Drunkenness, nnrt its Effects on 
the Human Body, refers various physical and mental 
maladies to the intemperance of parents. 



23 

ble, yet more revolting ; and it is not un- 
known to experience. It is when female 
purity is touched with this deadly stain. 
That is a wreck of all that God has made 
most honourable and lovely among his earth- 
ly works, which is truly meet for angels to 
weep over. What are its consequences 
too, at least in instances in which the most 
important relations of woman are sustained, 
and her influence, rightly used, is one of the 
most powerful and excellent instruments of 
the dispensations of the divine mercy. A 
man's associations with religion and goodness 
settle round his home. Drive them thence, 
and you sever his hold upon them. In the 
bustle of life, his mind is crowded, per- 
plexed, shaken. He goes home to refresh 
his virtues. Let him find there sensual 
degradation in one of its most hateful forms, 
and what wonder if he learn to forsake it ? 
What wonder, if, disappointed and des- 
perate, he forsake it for the resorts of vice, 
and himself have recourse for relief to the 



24 

same insane indulgence ? And then, the 
children whom it has pleased God in his 
mysterious providence to commit to such a 
mother. Neglected, harshly treated at one 
time, and at another the subjects of indul- 
gence as injurious, uninstructed, (at least 
by a consistent example, the best of teach- 
ers,) and when the offence becomes gross, 
having those feelings of reverential tender- 
ness, which most powerfully of all things, a 
mother's love is fitted to call forth, and 
which in almost all worthy men, have much 
connexion with whatever is best in their 
character, having these delicate and influen- 
tial feelings, I say, displaced by associations 
of mere brutality, what is to be augured of 
the temporal or eternal prospects of such 
children ? To the maternal feelings, the 
good being who implanted them, gave an 
unequalled strength. They reign alike su- 
preme in the proudest and the lowliest 
bosom. Among all impulses of all various 
kinds, only one has been found of force to 



25 

subdue them, and that is the love of intem- 
perate drinking. Horrible as the relation 
is, there are authenticated instances of 
mothers taking from their children's mouths 
the bread which charity had given to 
satisfy their hunger ; yea, literally stripping 
from their children the clothes which char- 
ity had given to keep them from the cold, 
and selling them for intoxicating liquor. If 
the passion is strong enough to do this, is 
there any thing else of such appalling might ? 
Considering the connexion of most men 
with either families or friends, would it be 
unreasonable to suppose, mat for every three 
habitually intemperate persons, there are as 
many as seven others, whose happiness is 
in some way seriously affected by the vice 
of those three ? If it be so, and there be 
now living in this country three hundred 
thousand persons devoted to the habit, then 
the unhappiness arising from it extends it- 
self directly to a million of persons, a twelfth 
part of the population of the country. This is 



26 

a very startling conclusion, but I see not how 
the inferences that lead to it are to be es- 
caped, and also it is to be considered, that 
in that class of society upon which most of 
my hearers (being acquainted with it) would 
form their judgment, the evil is incompara- 
bly less than in others, and that this portion 
of our country on the whole, presents an un- 
duly favourable specimen. If one man in 
twelve throughout this nation suffers in some 
way an important abatement from his hap- 
piness in consequence of the existence of 
fixed habits of drunkenness in himself or 
some one for whom he strongly feels, — nay 5 
qualify the supposition as you will, suppose 
there were but one such man in twenty, in 
thirty, — no more need be said to establish 
the conclusion, that intemperance is a pro- 
digious publick evil, and requires very seri- 
ous publick notice ; that a great national 
calamity at this moment is endured, and de- 
mands a great common effort. What a 
voice of wailing would be heard, if one man 



27 

in thirty throughout this republick were sen- 
tenced by some savage power to lose a 
hand. Yet what were this, compared with 
the tenfold worse than widowhood of a 
drunkard's wife, and his more than or- 
phaned children's shame ? 

The evil which we are deploring, has, in 
the third place, political aspects of the most 
alarming nature. They open a topick 
which may be considered to have some ap- 
propriateness on a day solemnized by pub- 
lick authority like this. A sad pre-emi- 
nence it is, but the politician and the political 
economist of America have need to devote 
a special share of their inquiries and coun- 
sels for the publick, to the effects of the 
use of ardent spirits. 

And, first, as to the waste of property 
which it occasions. 

According to the estimate before referred 
to, forty-five millions of gallons of ardent 
spirits of the different kinds are annually 
consumed in this country. Reckoning the 



2S 

cost of these to the consumer at an average 
of two thirds of a dollar, the amount an- 
nually expended in this way in the United 
States, would be* thirty millions of dollars, a 
sum which, though falling much short of the 
estimate that has commonly been made, is 
greater than that levied for the maintenance of 
the general government in all its departments, 
in the proportion of five to two. Of this 
sum, this city, taking its appropriations of 
this nature to be in the ratio of its popula- 
tion, pays yearly a hundred and fifty thou- 
sand dollars, about half the amount of its 
annual corporate expenditure. Undoubted- 
ly, however, this estimate must give a result 
much below the truth, as at this rate each 
licensed retailer would sell on an average to 
the amount of less than five dollars in a 
week, even if they sold all that is consumed, 
which again is by no means the case. The 
proportion of the commonwealth, reckoned 
upon its population, would be a million, five 
hundred thousand dollars ; six times as 



29 

much as the revenue that yearly goes 
into its treasury. Two hundred thous- 
and dollars, perhaps, are annually paid by 
the commonwealth for the support of the 
ministry, and two hundred and fifty 
for publick, and two hundred thousand 
for private instruction ; six hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars for the maintenance of 
the joint interests of learning and religion, 
and fifteen hundred thousand, at the lowest 
computation, for ardent spirits. A million 
and a half of dollars annually paid for intoxi- 
cating liquors, while to the venerable seat 
of learning, the pride of the noble founders 
of our State, from widen as from the heart 
into the system, has gone forth through suc- 
cessive generations the life-blood of its 
strength, it refuses to continue the grant of 
ten thousand dollars a year, because it is too 
poor. In like manner, an instance is known 
of a town of more than three thousand in- 
habitants which ceased to support the insti- 
tutions of religion, merely on the ground of 
c* 



30 

pecuniary incompetency, when it was found 
on inquiry, to spend ten thousand dollars an- 
nually on spirituous liquors. In the year 
1820, it was ascertained that the sum of one 
million eight hundred and ninety three thou- 
sand dollars was thus mischievously bestow- 
ed in the city of New York. 

But as regards waste, such statements as 
this, it will be said, only shew that money is 
shifting hands, and employing industry. It 
employs little industry, but as far as it does 
this, it is rather to be regarded as a bribe to 
unproductive labour ; and certainly it might 
shift hands to better purpose. But to bring 
the waste to a stricter test, he who consumes 
daily a pint of spirits made of rye, consumes 
yearly twenty five or thirty bushels of that 
valuable grain, and there being as I have 
stated, a million times that consumption 
among the population of our country, it 
follows that a quantity of nourishing food 
equivalent to twenty five or thirty millions 



31 

of bushels of grain is annually thus con- 
sumed. 

Again, with respect to publick waste : 
intemperance is the great cause of pauper- 
ism. The proportion of persons thus re- 
duced to want, to the whole number main- 
tained at the publick charge, varies as might 
be expected in different places. In the town 
of Portsmouth, ten years ago, a careful ex- 
amination of the circumstances of the tenants 
of the alms-house, showed the number of 
those whom love of this kind of pleasure had 
made poor men,* to be sixty-four out of 
eighty five, nearly four fifths. In Portland, 
about the same time, there were seventy-one 
such out of eighty-five, nearly six sevenths. 
In the state of New l?ork, in 1824, the 
proportion was four thousand seven hundred 
and forty-one out of six thousand eight hun- 
dred and ninety-six, more than two thirds. 
In the city of Baltimore, in the year ending 

* Prov. xxi. 17. 



32 

April 1826, of seven hundred and thirty- 
nine persons received into the alms-house, five 
hundred and fifty-four, that is three quarters 
were abandoned to intemperate habits.* 
The report on the pauper laws of this com- 
monwealth, made to the legislature by a 
Committee in 1821, contains the report of 
one town, that of twenty-eight persons in its 
alms-house, there were but two who were 
not brought thither, either directly or indi- 
rectly by intemperance. The general infer- 
ence is, that there cannot be a less propor- 
tion than two-thirds who become a publick 
burden from this cause. The annual ex- 
penditure of the commonwealth in this way 
was reckoned, in the reportf which I have 

* Fifty four were maniacs, and seven cripples, from 
this cause ; and twenty-eight suffering under fractures 
and wounds, received in a state of intoxicatiou. 

f A similar report was made in 1820, to the Legisla- 
ture of New Hampshire, from which it appeared that 
the expense for paupers was in a ratio of increase, 
which would double it once in five years. The Com- 



S3 

quoted, at three hundred and sixty thousand 
dollars, two hundred and forty thousand of 
which, at this rate, was levied in favour of 
persons ruined by one vice. It was also 
found that, in the twenty years immediately 
preceding, pauperism had increased three 
fifths. If its increase has not been checked, 
and intemperance has maintained its ground 
among the causes, it levies at this moment a 
tax of this kind, of three hundred and sixty 
thousand dollars. But other charities also 
provide for it ^"that is, there is in other w^ays 
a waste of property for its support. In 1820, 
it was officially stated, that of eighty-seven 
patients admitted into the New York Hos- 
pital for the Insane, the insanity of twenty- 
seven, nearly a third, was caused by the im- 
moderate use of ardent spirits. A physician 
attached to the Philadelphia Hospital, re- 
mittee thereupon brought in a bill, providing among 
other things, that ' no person, who shall be reduced to 
poverty by habitual drunkenness, shall be supported 
by any town.' 



34 

ported one third of the insane during his 
connexion with that institution, to have in- 
curred their dreadful malady through the 
same vice ; and in our General Hospital, 
since its institution, almost every individual 
case which has proved fatal, of casualty, of 
accidental wounds, has proved so in con- 
sequence of the subject being addicted to 
excess in drinking. Concerning the pro- 
portion of such persons cured or still under 
treatment, I am not informed. 

The expense bestowed in the support of 
paupers, who have become so by intemper- 
ance, does not represent the publick loss oc- 
sioned by them. Considering the economi- 
cal scale on which the publick maintains 
them, it would be rating the worth of their 
industry low, to say that the portion who 
might labour, if their vice had not disabled 
them, might earn twice as much as the living of 
the whole now costs. In a country like this, 
it is safe to assume, that every healthy man 
is able to maintain himself and a family in 



oo 



decency, and some degree of comfort ; 
which, at the lowest possible calculation, re- 
quires him to earn twice as much as the 
sum with which the publick supports a fam- 
ily of paupers. The intemperate paupers 
of this commonwealth, then, with the 
strength which their vice has stolen from 
them, instead of costing it three hundred 
and sixty thousand dollars, would be able to 
contribute to the common stock, an amount 
of labour worth seven hundred and twenty 
thousand, making a difference to its wealth 
of more than a million of dollars annually ; 
and if w r e add to this, the million and a half 
expended in the purchase of ardent spirits, 
the result is over two millions and a half, 
paid annually by the commonwealth, in these 
two ways, for them and their effects. The 
annual pauper expenses of the union, for 
the intemperate, have been stated to be 
twelve millions of dollars. If the argument 
were applied to that sum, that is, if that 
sum were held to represent one third of the 



36 

cost which intemperance brings in one way 
on the community, what a vast effect would 
this cause appear to have on the national re- 
sources. But I do not pursue it in regard 
to them, because I know not on what grounds 
the estimate is made, and incline to think 
that it cannot be relied on.* 

A second way in which intemperance af- 
fects the publick weal, is through its tenden- 
cy to multiply crimes. We scarcely take 
up a newspaper that we do not meet an ac- 
count of some outrage committed under the 

* It will be observed, that I have taken no notice of 
the large expenditures of voluntary charitable asso- 
ciations, and of private benevolence, on both of 
which intemperance makes its drains quite as much 
as on the legal provision, if not more. Intemperance 
is accountable, as will appear under the next head, 
for a large part of the cost of the infraction, admin- 
istration and execution of the criminal and other 
laws. Also, the community is heavily taxed for the 
drinking of the publick servants. Among the pro- 
visions for the army, advertised for by the commissa- 
ry department, to be delivered in the years 1822 and 
1823, were 73,240 gallons of whiskey. 



37 

influence of this voluntary diabolism, as it 
has been called. Of one thousand eight 
hundred and ninety-five complaints present- 
ed to the police court of this city, during 
the last year, four hundred and ten, two 
ninths, were under the statute against 
common drunkards. We could not adduce 
this naked fact, as proof that intemperance 
prompts to crime, but it is reasonable to 
suppose that what actually led to complaint 
against these individuals, was commonly 
some act or practice w r hich marked them as 
disorderly citizens, or troublesome neigh- 
bours. In the same period, were present- 
ed four hundred and seventy cases of as- 
sa ult and battery ,three quarte rs of which, 
it is thought, occurred in drunken broils, and 
a large proportion of the other crimes, there 
adjudged on, is referred to the same cause. 
The records of our courts certainly are 
not to be taken as an unfavourable standard, 
whereby to estimate what is doing in other 
cities equally populous, and statements from 



3S 

other cities confirm the general rule, in at 
least an equal application to them. In a 
report of the New York Society for the 
Prevention of Pauperism, presented in 1819, 
it was stated, that ' three fourths of the as- 
saults and batteries charged in the city and 
county of New York, and brought before 
the court of Sessions, proceed from the 
degrading use of ardent spirits.'* A judge 
of North Carolina lately declared from the 
bench, that of the cases of manslaughter 
which had come before him, there was not 
one which had not been occasioned by in- 
temperance, and few of murder, which 
were not attributable to the same cause. Of 
one thousand and sixty-one cases of crimi- 

* Another report made in 1821, states, that l the 
whole number of complaints for assaults and batte- 
ries during the last year, was 1061. During the first 
six months of that year, the number was 409 ; in the 
last six months, 652. About 180 new licenses were 
granted in the early part of those last six months, in 
the absence of the mayor.' 



39 

nal prosecutions in a court of that state, 
more than eight hundred are likewise stated 
to have had their origin in this vice. The 
experience of England is not ours, but the 
tendencies of the same sin are every 
where essentially the same, and therefore 
I will quote from an interesting paper, which 
I have lately seen, on this subject, a remark 
of Sir Matthew Hale.* ' The places of 
judicature,' said that great lawyer, * which I 
have so long held in this kingdom, have 
given me opportunity to observe the original 
cause of most of the enormities that have 
been committed for the space of near twen- 
ty years ; and by a due observation, I have 
found, that if the murders and manslaugh- 
ters, the burglaries and robberies, the riots 

* Report of the Portsmouth Society for the Sup- 
pression of Vice, published in the Massachusetts 
Journal, Vol. I. No. 37. The report has been ascrib- 
ed to the late lamented N. A. Haven, a name among 
the truly dear to letters, philanthropy, and re- 
ligion. 



40 

and tumults, the adulteries, — and other great 
enormities, that have happened in that time, 
were divided into five parts, four of them 
have been the issue and product of excess- 
ive drinking, of taverns and ale-house meet- 
ings.' 

But there are dangers threatening this 
nation from this cause, more serious than the 
waste which its rich resources are well able 
to redress, or even than the crimes, which 
its laws, standing and administered as now, 
are adequate to keep in check. It has 
pleased God, in his great goodness, to permit 
this people to govern themselves, and so to 
be dispensed from the severe oppressions in 
mind, body and estate, which the many are 
wont to feel wherever power is lodged in the 
hands of the few. Though a perfect inde- 
pendence has existed but of late in form, 
most of its privileges have been enjoyed 
since the earliest period of our institutions. 
The founders of those institutions and the 
successors to their lot were men fit to be 



41 

trusted with the great task of self-govern- 
ment, and we have still prospered in that 
task, because a portion of their spirit has 
descended to their children. They were 
men, to whom industrious, hardy, frugal 
habits gave strength of body, and clearness 
and sted fastness of mind. They were no 
slaves to luxury, that they could be bought, 
nor victims to it that they could be tamed 
and trampled on ; and therefore an almost 
unparalleled freedom is our birth-right this 
day. But should a base sensuality pursue 
and mature the conquests it has hitherto at- 
tempted with such deplorable success, — 
where then will be the nervous arms that 
should defend this soil as it has been de- 
fended ; — where the political wisdom widely 
diffused, to keep watch for the nation's safe- 
ty, for widely diffused it must be, or the des- 
tinies of the nation will cease to be commit- 
ted to the most trusty men ; — where the 
spirit of publick virtue, which will be ready 
for every sacrifice but the sacrifice of honour 



42 

and duty 6 ? I do not say that we are to see 
our warning in our predecessors on this soil, 
who have been swept away like the blighted 
leaves of their forests before the breath of the 
pestilence we have been this day deploring. 
I do not say that in an application to us as 
to them, the judgment predicted in our text 
is to be literally fulfilled, and this place of our 
possession to be made ' desolate, a land not 
inhabited.' I affirm no more than is past 
contradiction ; that slaves to their own de- 
sires are all ready to be slaves to other men ; 
that luxury has been the bane and ruin of 
republicks; and that the vile indulgence 
which is now a destruction wasting at noon- 
day among us, is luxury in one of its most 
menacing forms, and prepares a worthless 
population the most effectually for a master's 
yoke. We are jealous of our liberties, we 
say. And are we the first of modern free 
states that have been so, and yet have fallen *? 
Was not Venice watchful of its liberty, and 
self-devoting to maintain it, till enterprise 



43 

brought wealth, and wealth, indulgence, and 
indulgence, effeminacy, and effeminacy bon- 
dage % We are wise and refined, we think. 
Was Florence less so, when it unsaid all its 
weighty republican maxims, and bowed its 
neck to the foot of a rich and popular citi- 
zen 9 No, the guardian of our institutions 
is publick virtue ; an erect, manly virtue, in 
full command of all its powers ; an indepen- 
dent virtue, not capable of being seduced for 
the offered supply of a base appetite. Let 
but the habit we have been today contem- 
plating pursue its ravages, and that virtue 
will fast be sapped. A miserable population 
will grow numerous, the subjects alike of 
intimidation and bribes. Without sense of 
character, without means of living, they will 
stand ready to be the instruments of the 
ambitious purposes of any wicked man. Is 
it thought such persons will value their own 
political prerogatives too much to forego 
them, though they may not respect those of 
others, too much to invade them °l What 



44 

care such persons for the difference between 
one political relation and another 9 Their 
tastes have another object ; and is it to be 
supposed that the despotick appetite against 
which natural affection is powerless, is to 
pause in opposition to a thing so unsubstan- 
tial as a theory of the rights of man 9 

I cannot avoid thinking, that as there is 
no darker stain on our national morals, so> 
there is no darker cloud over our political 
prospects, — the prospect of the permanency 
of our free institutions, — than this. I see 
not how this view can be gainsaid, if it be 
true, as it is unquestionable, that intempe- 
rance is an evil of vast extent among us ; that 
it is a thorough corrupter of the mind ; 
that the disorders of a depraved population 
almost demand a despotism, and make it ac- 
ceptable, and that its services may always 
be bought to establish one. I never see the 
drunken crowd on our publick days cele- 
brating their freedom, that I do not think 
they are then preparing themselves to part 
with it. I cannot but consider it as incum- 



45 

bent on us as good citizens, — as friends to 
civil liberty, and desirous to transmit its 
blessings, — as careful for posterity, and anx- 
ious to secure to them the privileges we so 
value for ourselves, — I cannot but consider 
it as imperiously incumbent on us earnestly 
to inquire what w T e may do, and do with our 
might what we may, to stay for them the 
march of this appalling plague. I cannot 
but consider it to be so on the most general 
and admitted grounds. Scripture does not 
teach more emphatically than historical ex- 
perience the doctrines that righteousness ex- 
alteth a nation, and sin is the ruin as well as 
reproach of any people. The masters of 
political wisdom have no weightier lesson to 
instruct in, than that under the just govern- 
ment of a holy God, great national sins al- 
ways, sooner or later, draw down great na- 
tional judgments. Individuals go for their 
retribution to the other world, and in this the 
wicked may prosper ; but nations are not 
known in the other world, and they meet 



46 

their retribution here. But whatever be 
thought of our dangers and obligations as 
citizens, — as philanthropists and christians, 
our duty, in its principles, is plain. Never did 
a general calamity afflict this land calling 
near so loudly on compassionate and chris- 
tian men for sorrow, inquiry, concern and 
effort. I cannot now enter on an investiga- 
tion so extensive as that into the means of 
exertion which offer some assurance of suc- 
cess. But a useful beginning will have been 
made if we have come to see this day in any 
clearer light, how critical, how extreme, the 
exigency is. If we are not altogether blind 
to it, human as we are, and therefore indif- 
ferent to nothing which effects the interests 
of men, our hearts cannot but bleed at the 
view of many thousands of our brethren and 
companions yearly taking that path to utter 
ruin, which once entered on, there is scarce- 
ly strength in human nature to retrace ; in- 
volving themselves by their own mad act in 
all the worst evils to which flesh is heir, 



47 

wretched poverty, cruel disease, irreparable 
infamy, 

— — l all the fiercer tortures of the mind, 
c Unbounded passion, madness, guilt, remorse,' 

and spreading through the domestick and 
the social sphere, as far as their influence 
reaches, the fellowship of their own woes. 
If we are christians, we can scarcely think 
without shuddering sensibility, of thousands 
of immortals killing the religious being within 
them ; divesting themselves of their conge- 
niality with spiritual and heavenly natures ; 
becoming like to the beasts that perish in all 
except those diversities of presumptuous 
guilt which the beasts cannot imitate, and 
that responsibleness whose penalties await 
them at the judgment seat of a deeply of- 
fended God. My friends, as lovers of men, 
and as lovers of God, let us ask ourselves, 
have we any thing to do, to arrest this 
sweeping current of evil. Some of us have 
wealth, some station, some authority of some 
kind. Those of us who can do no more can 



48 

set an example, and no good example was 
ever lost. What can we do, what is the 
most we can do, with all strenuous endeav- 
ours in our power, in this emergency ? Let 
the question be weighed by each one of us 
with solicitude, solemnity, and prayer ; and 
may God, the source of wisdom, enlighten 
us with a reply, that where there is such a 
call for prudent, combined, and vigorous 
effort, no one's aid may be wanting who has 
any aid to lend. 



PROVERBS xx. 1. 

Strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is 
not wise. 



When I entered on the subject of the 
prevailing excess in drinking, I had no ex- 
pectation of being led to pursue it to such a 
length. But if it has been the effect of our 
reflections to satisfy us that a most serious 
evil now weighs on this community, afflict- 
ing it and threatening it with a host of evils 
more, we cannot wish to dismiss the subject 
till we have asked where the sources of the 
mischief lie, and whether and where any 
remedy is to be found. To the first of these 
inquiries I at this time solicit your attention. 
That strong drink is raging, and that whoso- 
ever is deceived thereby is not wise, we need 
no further to be shewn. But we desire to 



50 



see how it is that so many are in fact de- 
ceived thereby. 

Various causes of this excess may be as- 
signed, as each operating in numerous cases. 
For instance, uneasiness of mind is frequent- 
ly seen to lead to it. Grief, embarrassed 
circumstances, remorse, disappointed love 
or ambition, domestick trials, make a man's 
life seem a burden to him, and prompt him 
to seek a temporary cheerfulness by artificial 
means. His mind is relieved and exalted 
by the physical excitement, but with return- 
ing sobriety comes an hour made sadder by 
the addition of nervous debility and a sense 
of degradation, and he is driven again more 
strongly to the same expedient. The con- 
sequences of each successive indulgence 
urge with added force to a repetition of the 
like, and the indissoluble charms of the habit 
are locked. This is the case on which the 
pity the world bestows is mingled most with 
tenderness, and least with contempt. But 
what an humbling thought it is, that the suf- 



51 

ferings of sentiment, often of the most pure 
and generous kind, shall impel men to the 
grossest gratifications of sense, and subdue 
them to its meanest thraldom. How ten- 
fold cruel are they when they tempt the dis- 
tress they create, to rush for relief into the 
arms of the worst dishonour. 

A kind and friendly disposition, again, it 
is grievous to say, is often seen leading to 
the same consequence. How well estab- 
lished a connexion of this sort, has been ex- 
perienced by those who speak our language, 
to exist, may be seen, for example, in a 
word in use among them. Conviviality, 
according to its construction, means com- 
panionship, friendly intercourse in society. 
In its well known acceptation, it denotes free 
drinking together. Within certain limits of 
the excitement thus produced, its effect on a 
mind disposed by the presence and conver- 
sation of friends to a friendly tone, is to give 
warmth to the friendly feelings, and open 
the heart to sincerity by removing the re- 



52 

straints imposed by a wise or a selfish pru- 
dence, — which ever in the particular case 
it may chance to be. Woe to him who to 
any peculiar strength of the amiable dispo*- 
sitions which prompt men to seek society, 
adds any peculiar power to make his own 
desirable, unless he have cares, or fixed 
habits, or rooted principles, to meet the trials 
to which he will be probably exposed. A 
talent to entertain is a most portentous gift to 
a man without firm virtue, and with time to 
spare. Company seeks and caresses him. 
His hour of triumph is his hour of revelry. 
Amidst its freedom, his wit is brightest and 
most applauded, and his heart is fullest in its 
song. He thinks that good fellowship at- 
tracts him by its intellectual and honest joys, 
and perhaps does not suspect himself to be 
solicited by appetite, till he has too good rea- 
son to know that he is a bond slave to it. 
1 O that we should,' says one of the charac- 
ters of the great dramatist, ' with joy, revel, 
pleasure, and applause, transform ourselves 



oo 



into beasts.' He follows that broad way 
that leadeth to destruction, whereat there be 
so many who go in, and when his doom is 
sealed, when the accomplishments that 
brought his fall, have shared in it, and the 
more prudent associates of his days of flat- 
tered folly do not recognise his altered form, 
he derives what satisfaction he may from 
knowing what all will say, — that he was no- 
body's enemy but his own ; — that it was his 
good heart that ruined him. 

Want of occupation, itself, apart from 
the dangers of society incident to it, is fruit- 
ful of temptation in this respect. The hu- 
man mind is so made, as to demand excite- 
ment. Repose, if one may use so strange 
an expression, is an uneasy state to it. 
Without something to occupy and stimulate 
it, it preys upon itself. Wisely was it so 
constituted, for by this impulse, its author 
designed that it should be driven to seek 
excitement in useful occupation. From that 
state of depression, which, to those who 



54 

do not so occupy it, is its natural state, it is 
but too likely to have recourse for relief, to 
the pernicious indulgence on which we are 
discoursing. No one, who has not some em- 
ployment, is, in the existing state of things, 
safe against it. Dispensation from labour is 
continually experienced to be ruinous, to 
that class in the community, who are little 
acquainted with intellectual pleasures ; and 
he, whose worldly concerns do not demand 
his care, is a subject of concern, unless he 
has resources in plans or offices of ser- 
vice to others, or in a taste for the cultiva- 
tion of his own mind. 

We might add to such causes of intem- 
perance, but it would be to no purpose. 
For what is it for which these, and other 
such, account ? Plainly for nothing more 
than this. For the difference between the 
moderate and the immoderate use of the 
means of intoxication. And this needs no 
accounting for. It sufficiently explains itself. 
Particular causes, such as have been touch- 



DO 



ed upon, may lead to excess in particular 
instances ; but without the appearance of 
any such causes, the phenomenon is fully 
solved. The fact is, that spirituous liquors 
possess the remarkable, the mysterious prop- 
erty to practise on minds, otherwise most 
clear and w T ary, that deception of which our 
text calls the subject unwise. Administer- 
ed to the human constitution, they so affect 
it, as to dispose it powerfully to an excessive 
indulgence in them. They invite the appe- 
tite urgently, when a relish for them has 
once been formed, to overstep the limits of 
a strict temperance, and when that step has 
been taken, they have depraved the appe- 
tite. They have given it a vigour, which is 
monstrous. They have created an unnatu- 
ral craving, which growing continually as it 
is fed, hurries the victim on with a strength 
which is all but irresistible. I do not un- 
dertake to describe the physical process. 
That would be the subject of another kind 
of treatise> But I speak nothing but most 



56 

painfully familiar truth, when I say, that with 
more certainty than vaccination changes the 
constitution, so that the subject cannot suf- 
fer from that disorder against which it is a 
precaution, a certain degree of indulgence, 
towards which every degree of indulgence 
tends, so alters the constitution, that the sub- 
ject cannot again be a temperate man. We 
know of nothing which so takes away the 
freedom of the will. A certain point pass- 
ed, which no one is conscious of having 
approached, till it is passed, and to all human 
expectation, though not indeed to human 
effort, he must be given up as lost. It is all 
but certain, that he is soon to go down to his 
grave a dishonoured, undone man. Motives 
are no longer any thing to him. Dread of 
disease and want in their most revolting 
forms ; srjame ; pity for his best friends ; 
fear and hope of a hereafter, — to all that can 
touch a manly heart, and that once touched 
his, to all he is as insensible as a rock. The 
relentless demon has clutched his prey, and 



57 

will drag it down to his place. I do not say 
that there have not been instances of reform, 
when hope was gone. But they are so con- 
trary to common experience, that we hear 
of them almost with the same incredulity 
that we hear of apparitions from the invisi- 
ble world, and stories of one and of the 
other, which we undertake to trace, gener- 
ally turn out to be equally unfounded. 

The frequent excess then, in the use of 
ardent spirits, is sufficiently accounted for, by 
their own nature, wherever they are in gen- 
eral use at all, as much as it would be ac- 
counted for, where a fever should spread, 
that many, from individual circumstances of 
constitution or exposure, should have it 
severely and die. And this then, is what I 
maintain ; that it is the prevailing use of 
ardent spirits, which is chargeable with the 
frequent immoderate use of them. Their 
use is reputable and general, and therefore 
it is, that their fatal use is common. Is it 
not so ? Those who are from time to time 



58 

breaking from the ranks, and going over 
into the class of intemperate persons, are 
we not sure that it was in each of them the 
less indulgence which challenged no blame, 
that led to the greater, which is infamous and 
destructive °l Going further back, can we 
entertain the smallest doubt, that it was 
the unchallenged customs of society, that 
brought them first within the sphere of that 
influence, which is about to be thus consum- 
ated *? The infant loathes distilled spirits. 
So does the man, if his taste has not been 
won to them by palatable mixtures ; by use 
in the first place, from some imagined ne- 
cessity, to his health, for instance; by exam- 
ple ; or by some associations of the mind. 
And even in those instances where a specif- 
ick temptation to excessive indulgence can 
be named, it accounts, as has been said, for 
nothing but the excess, and not for that 
more guarded indulgence, to which the ex- 
cess relates, and without which, as a prepa- 
ration, it would not, in any case, have exist- 



59 

ed. Why did the boon companion make 
merry with his friends with liquor ; why 
not with exhilarating gas, which would have 
made them happier while under its effects, 
and left them happier when its effects sub- 
sided *? Why did he who felt the smart of 
a wounded spirit, and he who was harassed 
by vacuity of mind, not have recourse to 
the poppy's juices *? They are a better se- 
dative, are more conveniently administered, 
and lap the sick soul in a more glorious 
elysium of the fancy. This is a Turk's 
medicine for ' a mind diseased.' Why is it 
not a Christian's °l 

There is but one answer. It is because 
the gas was out of the way, a thing almost 
unknown, hidden in the chemist's laborato- 
ry ; and the opium was out of the way, 
among the apothecary's secret stores ; nei- 
ther of them substances familiar to the habits 
of society, and included in the economy of 
daily life. The ardent spirit was in the 
way, and not to be sought beyond where 



60 

friends meet, and families dwell, and indi- 
viduals for their various purposes resort, 
and the crowds of business and pleasure 
' most do congregate.' All comes to the 
same point ; it is, that ardent spirits are 
so often used to excess, because they are in 
general use among us, meeting us at every 
turn, and because with or without what in 
the individual case we call cause, it is to 
excess in frequent instances, that, when gen- 
erally used at all, they tend with a powerful 
urgency. Every where men meet with them, 
and, meeting with them, men are constitution- 
ally liable to become their prey. This is not 
necessary, and many in fact escape. Num- 
bers who use them, it is needless to say, are 
men without a blot. But what do we thence 
infer ? We might master a lion who should 
waylay us ; but a country infested with lions, 
would not therefore cease to be dangerous to 
live in. — What has established that habit of 
society, which involves so much danger, and 
actually produces year by year so much woe ; 



61 

Partly, it may be supposed, (for we hear 
that reason often given,) that ardent spirits 
are reckoned to be useful in frequent exi- 
gencies of the health. Is a person chilled ; 
they are the common prescription to warm 
him. Is he heated ; they will refresh him. 
Is he fatigued in body, they will bring back 
strength ; or in mind, they will restore tone 
and cheerfulness. Has he taken cold, they 
will expel it. Is he to be exposed to take 
cold, they are that preventive, a little of 
which is better than much cure. Are his 
nerves shaken, they will compose them. Is 
his blood sluggish, they will stir it.* It would 
seem, to hear their virtues successively set 

* In respect to morning drinking, there has been, in 
this quarter, a manifest improvement in the present 
generation. Thirty years ago, grave, honourable, yea, 
reverend gentlemen, were habitually thirsty at eleven 
o'clock. I have heard it said, however, that the use of 
herb juleps, as they are called, is travelling towards the 
north. It is most devoutly to be hoped, that the fash- 
ion of this morning prophylactick, is not destined to 
pass the New England border, 
F 



62 

forth, that the alchymists might break their 
crucibles, for the panacea was found. I 
shall not undertake to say, that there are 
not constitutions which they may benefit, 
when those constitutions have become inured 
to the sparing use of them. I shall not 
deny that there may be other peculiar con- 
stitutions to which, without the self-created 
demand of previous use, they may be ser- 
viceable ; though I should think it not 
amiss in persons possessing such, to resolve 
that they will resort to them, as they would 
to mercury or hemlock, or any of the most 
unsafe materials of the healing art, — that is, 
under the strict guidance of professional 
wisdom. But full often has the conscien- 
tious physician seen cause to rue the day 
when he gave for the medicine of the body 
what proved in the result, the bane of the 
soul ; and if not one of the most brilliant 
recent discoveries of medical science, be- 
cause not made of a sudden, still one of the 
most valuable, not to say the most so, is, 



63 

that distilled liquors are not nearly so often 
as has been thought, applicable to medicinal 
uses ; — a conviction which is becoming 
firmer and extending itself every day, with 
the progress of the art, and the collations 
of different experience.* It is a maxim 
now among the professional men in the se- 
verely warm climates of the East and West 
Indies, that 'spirituous liquors, whether 
used habitually, moderately, or in excessive 
quantities, always diminish in the same 
degree the vital strength, and render men 
more susceptible of disease ;' and the same 
is the result of the experience of our south- 
ern cities.f — It is not artificial stimulus 

* The practice of administering medicine in spirit- 
uous vehicles, by which great harm has been done, 
is, now, I am told, in great part discontinued. 

t i They dispose to every form of acute disease. 
They moreover excite fevers in persons predisposed 
to them, from other causes. This has been remarked 
in all the yellow fevers which have visited the cities 
of the United States. Hard drinkers seldom escape, 
and scarcely ever recover from them.' — Rush's In- 
quiry, p. 8. 



64 



that gives strength, but natural food. All 
observation and experiment go to shew it. 
Would it not have been strange if God, who 
meant man to have strength to labour and 
endure, should have designed him to derive 
it, not from the substantial fruits of the earth, 
but from a curious extract of art °l Would 
it not have been out of all analogy ? What 
other animal is so nourished ? Do you 
strengthen the hard-working horse or ox 
with the simple grain, or with the intoxicat- 
ing essence you obtain from it ; and if it were 
prepared for their diet as it is for that of 
their driver, would they serve him so well 
or so long as they do ? The Roman sol- 
diers, who overran the world, drank vinegar 
and water. In the parent country, training 
for athletick exercises, demanding the great- 
est attainable power of action and endur- 
ance, is reduced to a regular science. The 
subjects of it are a class of men, little influ- 
enced by moral considerations. Their dis- 
cipline is merely a discipline to bring the 



65 

human machine to its maximum of exertion 
of activity and force, and one of its rules, it 
is said, founded on the nicest observation 
and full experience, is an utter prohibition 
of the use of spirituous liquors.* There 
can be little doubt, that taking the twenty- 
four hours together, the temporary excite- 
ment produced by ardent spirits does not 
compensate the succeeding languor ; and 
there can be no doubt that, other things 
being equal, the persons who wholly abstain 
from them through their lives, have essen- 
tially greater strength of body and mind, 
and are happier, and longer lived. In cases 
of extreme hardship, such as cold, watch- 
ing, and fatigue in war, it has appeared 
that the most temperate have been the most 
able to endure ; and in shipwrecks* in ninety- 
nine cases in a hundred, it has not been the 
seemingly hardy sailors, used to all kinds of 

* See on this subject, Dr. Bradford's Address be- 
fore the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression 
of Intemperance. 

F* 



66 

exposure, who have suffered least, but their 
officers, more delicately reared, more used 
to comforts and indulgences, but who, from 
the sense of their responsibleness for the 
safety of the rest, have abstained from their 
excesses. It has even been ascertained to 
be an errour, that there is danger to life, in 
wholly and of a sudden discontinuing the 
use of ardent spirits, in cases where it has 
been the most immoderate. The patient in 
such cases, undergoes a disease which, 
among its subjects, is denominated the hor- 
rours, and which has been thought to be in 
its nature fatal, unless the customary stimu- 
lus were supplied. He is thrown into the 
most miserable condition of bodily and men- 
tal imbecility. He cannot sleep. He sees 
all sorts of frightful phantoms of the imagi- 
nation in a crowd around him, with (as it 
seems to himself) the distinctness and cer- 
tainty of actual sense ; and sustains, in short, 
all agonies of terrour. The fit comes on 
after a day of abstinence, and lasts some- 



6? 

times four days, though commonly less than 
two, and leaves the body and mind feeble, 
but without disease. I mention it as great- 
ly to the honour of the physician of the 
House of Correction in this city,* that pro- 
ceeding with a judgment and courage that 
justified each the other, he has established 
the common opinion concerning the need- 
ful palliative in this case, to be groundless. 
Of two hundred and fifty patients, with 
whom he has enforced total abstinence, he 
has lost not one. 

Another cause of that general use of ar- 
dent spirits, which in its turn is the cause of 
their excessive use, is their instituted con- 
nexion, in the minds and habits of a great 
portion of the people, with the intercourse of 
friendship, and the duties of hospitality. It 
is hard to account for the origin of the differ- 
ent habits of different nations. This happens 

* Dr. Joshua B. Flint. I understand that the same 
course has also been taken, and with an equally satis- 
factory result, in the state's prison at Charlestown. 



68 

to be ours. The Asiatick gives bis guests 
and bis friends presents to carry away. The 
Frenchman entertains with his ices and his 
coffee ; the Indian with his pipe ; the Italian 
with his gardens, his pictures and his mu- 
sick, without any thing to satisfy hunger or 
thirst, taking it for granted that, as to these 
wants, his guests have provided for them- 
selves at home. We of the English race 
shew our good will with what we call good 
cheer ; another phrase which speaks our 
sense of a connexion before referred to; 
for cheer in its original signification means 
gayety and spirit ; in that which it has ac- 
quired through our habits, it means meat 
and drink. The connexion is by no means 
altogether arbitrary. Eating and drinking 
together is a natural and proper sign 
enough of concord, and under different modi- 
fications has perhaps been so considered at 
all times. The temperate participation of 
them itself elevates the spirits, and the sea- 
sons for them are naturally therefore chosen 



69 

as the seasons for social interviews. Be- 
sides which, they give opportunity to the 
offerer to shew his friendship by a trifling act 
of generosity, which is likely to be kindly 
taken. Why, in this character of a courte- 
ous and hospitable offering, provision for 
thirst has so taken precedence of provision 
for hunger is not so clear. Perhaps it is 
because the former is more readily at hand, 
and soonest prepared and disposed of. Per- 
haps, because the excitement of animal spirits 
produced by it is more quickly obtained and 
in a higher degree. Bat how T ever this may 
be, the fact is that the offer of stimulating 
liquid of some form is in this and the parent 
country the customary offer of. courtesy, in 
most classes of society. Among the citizens 
of the parent country, it is not so generally 
made in the form of distilled spirits, because, 
happily for them, that product is exceeding- 
ly dear ; happily for them, at least, 1 it would 
be, if the strong appetite for the exciting 
essence did not lead them to secure it by con- 



70 



suming greater quantities of products which 
contain it in a less concentrated form. Here, 
on the contrary, they are exceedingly cheap ; 
so much so, that I suppose it would be 
speaking within bounds to say that with the 
fruits of the labour of one day in the week, 
a man might keep himself completely bru- 
talized and helpless by them during the re- 
maining six. The consequence is that they 
are within the perfectly convenient reach of 
every individual, who desires to have them 
to use or to bestow ; and this fully explains 
why, in the intercourse of the great majority 
of persons in this community, they should 
have established a preference to be the 
customary token of that good will, which 
some offering to the palate is looked for to 
testify. Such, at any rate, they now are 
among us ; and this being so, when they are 
always stored on the shelf of the household- 
er, and held to the visitor's lips, — when they 
are at hand in every place of amusement, 
or of bargaining, or of service, to seal every 



71 

contract, and renew every acquaintance, and 
requite every good turn, — when one must offer, 
and therefore must taste, and the other must 
accept, or be reckoned churlish, what won- 
der that that use of them should be prevailing 
and habitual, out of which a pernicious use 
is so certain in numerous cases to grow ? 

I might therefore name the cheapness of 
ardent spirits among us as a third cause of 
their general use, but it blends itself with the 
other two. Because they are thought de- 
sirable for nourishment and medicine, and 
comfort and companionship, and because 
they are cheaply had, they are every where 
to be found, provided for these purposes ; 
and, — being so used(without the restraint of 
costliness) for these, whenever they are im- 
agined to occur, — they actually run, in fre- 
quent instances, into that excess, to which 
of their nature, they strongly tend. Again ; 
being so freely provided for these uses, they 
are ready to serve any other not compre- 
hended in these. Make any expedient fre- 



72 

quent and agreeable, and you need give no 
other reason for a resort to it which shall 
be causeless, unexcused and constant. Re- 
versing the law of economicks, the supply 
creates the demand. It is furnished to serve 
many uses, and being furnished, it suggests 
itself and is found applicable for all. Thus 
ardent spirits have extensively established 
their place among the regular provisions of 
families, and on the table of daily repast. 
Along with the common means of suste- 
nance, they are in the sight of children, and 
sometimes without doubt at their lips, diluted 
and sweetened at first so as not to offend 
their taste. They come with not a few to 
stand almost in the place of food, nay, one 
might say, of shelter, fire, and raiment. No 
where are they out of place. They me- 
nace with their serpent's bite, they brandish 
their adder's sting, in meetings for sacred 
duties, nay, in meetings for funeral sorrow. 
Are we to expect to be thus continually dis- 



73 



turbing such a reptile, and never to feel its 
fang !* 

There is another way in which the sup- 
ply creates the demand. It is in the multi- 
plication of houses licensed for the sale of 
ardent spirits by retail. There are more 



■ A little girl at one of the primary schools, after 
repeating the letters of the word coffee, hesitated to 
pronounce it. l What does your mother get for your 
breakfast?' asked the mistress, by way of helping her. 
The child promptly answered < Rum.' A female do- 
mestick, thirteen or fourteen years old, after visiting 
her parents, was observed to come home intoxicated, 
and on inquiry it was found that ardent spirits were 
given her at that repast, of which tea is commonly 
the provision. These are only two examples, which I 
happen lately to have heard, of what most persons 
know, that spirituous liquors are instar omnium with 
many families among our population. In the course 
of some inquiries into the state of the poor in Charles- 
town within a few winters, three or four little children, 
from infancy upwards, were found huddled together 
in a miserable bed, in the dead sleep of drunkenness. 
Their mother said that being destitute of means to feed, 
clothe, or warm them properly, she quieted them, 
when they woke, with a new dose of liquor. 
G 



74 

dangerous places of resort than these, no 
doubt. It appears from lime to time on the 
records of our courts, that there are haunts 
of intemperance furnished for the greater al- 
lurement with meam of gambling, and ether 
seductions; and lately there was brought to 
light a den of wickedness where an intoxi- 
cating mixture, till now unknown, of perni- 
cious drugs, was prepared, chiefly, as it 
appeared Idren, — the best nursery, 

hitherto discovered, of those offenders of 
tender age, who month by month, are con- 
victed under the statute against common 
drunkards.* But I speak not of these, but 

* A child was brought up for stealing a watch, under 
complaint of the keeper of this establishment, 
who, it appeared, had crazed him by administering- 
this preparation, to which, in evidence, he gave the 
name of Tom and Terry. The court held the land- 
lord to be most culpable, and under its direction an 
uncommonly respectable jury acquitted the little 
wretch. 

In the case of most of the juvenile offenders 
charged in the police court with assaults and 
other disturbances of the peace, it appears on ex- 



75 

of resorts which break no law. It is enough 
for serious detriment to the publick morals, 
that numerous opportunities should be fur- 
nished to intemperance, to put out of view 
all other excitement. Under the present 
vigilant administration of our city govern- 
ment, there are no less than five hundred 
and eighty licensed tenements, nearly all of 
them having licenses as 'victualling houses, and 
accordingly being authorized to sell liquors 
in the smallest quantities, to be drunken 
upon the premise? \ and most of them too 
being the same places where groceries and 
other requisites of a family are obtained, so 
that they present the temptation to the view 
when visited with a different purpose, and 
make it convenient to take the change of 
money paid for other commodities, in ardent 
spirits. Five hundred and eighty licensed 

animation that the excitement of ardent spirits was the 
origin of their offence, and children apprehended for 
pilfe. mg are not uncommonly brought before the 
magistrates intoxicated. 



76 

houses ; one licensed house to every sixteen 
not licensed ; one licensed house to every 
thirty-four male citizens over sixteen years 
of age. The weather must be inclement 
which can part an idle person from his cups, 
when at the worst the chance is that he may 
enjoy them, and with them a circle of con- 
genial society, within sixteen doors of his 
own. A labouring man must choose his 
way well, who in going a mile from his work 
to his home, should not pass a hundred 
points where his virtue is thus tried. After 
every sixteenth house, on an average, as he 
goes, the means of vicious indulgence are 
presented to him, not improbably with the 
added inducement of the sight of some ac- 
quaintance partaking of them. 

Such are some of the causes of the great 
evil we have been lamenting. Let their 
reality be well examined and weighed. It is 
much more easy to detect their existence 
than to devise their remedies. Yet let not 
even that be despaired of. To find and apply 



them is a great and good work. It is but just 
begun, and it is too early for discouragement 
to await it. Let men do their part, and in 
his own good time, through the providential 
teaching of experience, a wisdom from God 
will explain the means of success, and an 
energy from God will use them. 



.*• 



1 CORINTHIANS viii. 1& 

If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while 
the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend. 



We have attended to some statements, 
relating to the appalling consequences, here 
and hereafter, of the vice of intemperate 
drinking ; the extent to which it prevails in 
our community ; the loss and disturbance 
which the publick suffers from it, and the 
dangers with which it threatens even so 
stable a thing as our political institutions. 
We have also made some inquiry into the 
causes which lead to the destructive in- 
dulgence. 

So far, our way was sufficiently plain. 
We had only to use our senses, and we 
could not fail to see it. We approach now 
a much more difficult question. What can 



79 

be done to stay this torrent of woe and 
death ; to stop this overflowing fountain of 
private and publick ruin ? 

The readiest way would seem to be to 
invoke the authority of law. It is by laws, 
with suitable penalties annexed, that in other 
cases the community provides for the per- 
manence of its institutions, and protects the 
innocent against invasion from the guilty. 
For such protection we look, in the first in- 
stance, to the parental government of our 
own commonwealth. Our ancestors, in the 
first and the early part of the second centu- 
ry of our history, thought this a proper field 
for their operation. Two great features of 
their legislation on the subject, have since 
disappeared. 1. They made each separate 
act of drunkenness indictable and punisha- 
ble, as an act of assault or larceny now is ; 
thus rendering it infamous, and obstructing 
that repetition of it, which is necessary to 
the forming of the habit. 2. They enjoin- 
ed on the municipal authorities to prosecute 



80 



such offenders, and to employ persons to 
inform against them, with a compensation 
for their services, thus refusing to rely on 
the always invidious method of private in- 
formation. They also, by an act passed at 
a still earlier period, forbad persons employ- 
ing workmen, to give them strong liquors, 
except in cases of necessity. These pro- 
visions are all done away. Our existing 
laws only punish or restrain persons w r ho 
are proved, 1. to be common drunkards; 
2. to be injuring or endangering their 
health by intemperance ; 3. to be expos- 
ing themselves or their families to become 
a publick charge ; 4. to have been guilty 
of excess in a licensed house. It is but 
too plain, that whenever either of these 
cases brings the citizen within the reach of 
the law, the law finds him too late for his 
own good. 

Was there not reason in the view which 
our fathers took of this subject °l Does it 
not accord with just principles of law, to 



81 

compel the citizen under pain of its retribu- 
tions to keep sober, as much as to compel 
him to remain peaceable or honest, provid- 
ed his intemperance injures other individu- 
als and the community, as much as his pas- 
sion or his dishonesty would injure them "? 
And is not this condition met 9 Are acts 
of violence or of fraud often committed, 
which affect the community so injuriously as 
an example of vicious excess ; and how 
often do we hear of such an act, which in- 
flicts on individuals so grievous a wrong, as 
is inflicted by intemperance on all whose 
fortunes or whose hearts are bound to its 
victim 1 The lenity which lets it pass un- 
punished and so emboldens it, seems no less 
than just so much cruel injustice to the bet- 
ter part of society ; — oppression of the in- 
nocent in subjecting them to ill treatment 
from the guilty, and of the industrious in 
compelling them to take the burden of main- 
taining the improvident and idle. To pun- 
ish drunkenness as a crime in itself, has 



82 

been a course often enough adopted. The 
Romans went so far, as to punish capitally 
a single transgression of the kind by a fe- 
male. And as to encroachments upon the 
liberties of the citizen, the publick often 
protects itself, (and is held by all writers to 
be justified by the great law of self-preser- 
vation in doing so,) by processes which might 
far better be reckoned encroachments, ap- 
plied to cases too, where the citizen is 
chargeable with no offence whatsoever. 
Take the case of the health laws. A per- 
son is taken ill in one of our cities with a 
disease, supposed to be infectious. This 
is no fault of his. On the contrary, it 
makes him a subject of pity. But, against 
his will, he must be taken from the comforts 
of home, and the reliefs of domestick care, 
to take his fate, whatever it may be, in some 
place unknown, and often odious to him. 
Repeated instances have occurred in this 
country, and in former times in this town, 
in which to the pain of separation, and the 



83 

hazard of removal, — unavoidable inconven- 
iencies, — has been added the grievance of 
exposure to a place, and to circumstances, of 
peculiar danger. With the last winter there 
occurred here a rare instance, if not the 
first, of an individual reputed to be suffer- 
ing under a contagious disease, being per- 
mitted by the authorities to struggle with it 
quietly at home, under proper and sufficient 
securities. By the quarantine laws of most 
of our cities, persons arriving from tropical 
climates or suspected places, are required to 
remain a certain number of days, without 
intercourse with their friends, whatever 
reasons they may have for impatience, and 
under circumstances always wearisome and 
disagreeable in the extreme. This alone 
is punishment enough for those who have 
committed no fault, but it has not seldom 
happened that they have also been com- 
pelled to remain more or less within the 
reach of infection, and incurred the conse- 
quences. If the good of the whole rightly 



84 

enforces such restraints on the liberty of 
such as, without any fault, might spread 
physical pestilence, has it no privileges in 
respect to the voluntary diffuser of a moral 
pestilence, with all its diversity of destruc- 
tive consequences ; or is the danger thus 
threatened to be accounted less worthy of 
precautions !■ 

But I would be as far as any one from 
defending any course likely to infringe the 
just freedom of the citizen. It may be, that 
the offence could not be satisfactorily de- 
fined, and that penal laws, of the kind in 
view, might lead to an oppressive scrutiny 
of private life. Yet are there not, let me 
ask, some legislative provisions, liable to no 
objection in point of principle, and which 
might, if not at once, yet by degrees, be 
introduced °l Would it not be possible, by 
a general law, to proportion the number of 
licensed houses, in each municipality, to its 
population, according to the supposed gen- 
eral exigency ; and, since the difficulty of 



65 

discriminating between different applications 
is so great, as almost to excuse the munici- 
pal authorities for unreasonably multiplying 
recommendations, might not a heavy tax be 
imposed by law, on the renewal of licenses, 
a tax which the few who would then monop- 
olize the traffick, would be well able to pay, 
and which would have the general effect to 
place them in the hands of persons of some 
standing in society, as well as to diminish the 
number of places of allurement ? If ardent 
spirits were thus made to deposit in the treas- 
ury a sum adequate to the support of the pau- 
perism they create, it would not seem that 
there w T as injustice done. The effect of a sim- 
ilar measure has been incidentally tried, if 
proof of the effect were needed. In three 
years from the beginning of 1814, after which 
the internal duty, levied by the general gov- 
ernment, became payable, fewer licenses by 
far were taken out in the counties of Suffolk 
and Essex, than in the years before and 

H 



86 



after ; and there is no reason to doubt, that 
the same was the consequence elsewhere. 
In populous towns, might not the privilege 
of retailing liquor be withholden from places 
where household stores are sold, and where, 
of consequence, it is placed in the way of 
so many who do not come to seek it ? Is 
there no just method of instituting some differ- 
ence in the treatment of paupers by reason 
of intemperance, and others ? May not 
guardians be trusted with authority over 
the persons of their intemperate wards ? 
May not town officers be required to prose- 
cute illegal practices of retailers'? Might 
they not be forbidden, under forfeiture of 
fheir privilege, to sell liquor to paupers, and 
to other individuals, on a private injunction 
of town officers, grounded on a representa- 
tion made by the friends of those individu- 
als, or by other citizens, that they were fall- 
ing into intemperate habits, which represen- 
tation should have been ascertained by prop- 
er inquiry to be just °l One happy effect of 



S7 



such a measure would be, to remove from 
the view of the many, whose occasions 
call them to move from place to place, that 
crowd of loathsome loiterers, young and 
old, who from town to town, are seen haunt- 
ing the spot where the conveyance rests. 
In Italy, where natural deformities abound, 
and where, from the misplaced generosity 
of travellers, a hideous deformity is a for- 
tune, no sight so painful as that is to be 
seen. A limb which nature has wrenched, 
is no object of disgust, like a form which 
vice has disfigured. Again ; one state has 
prohibited magistrates from holding their 
courts in taverns, as leading their suitors 
within sight of temptation ; and a governour 
of New York, some years ago, recommend- 
ed to its legislature, that demands for spiritu- 
ous liquors sold by retail, should be made not 
recoverable by law. Is there nothing prac- 
ticable and promising in such provisions °l 
It becomes me not to say, that there are not 
insuperable objections to all such. But it is 



88 

not amiss for the questions to be moved. 
And those of us, who have not the laws to 
make, have only to inquire what it is desira- 
ble to do. We may leave it to legislators 
to see the difficulties which occur in doing 
it. 

Again ; is there nothing to be expected 
to this end, from the wisdom of the nation % 
From that source, if such were the publick 
sense, an efficient coercive measure would 
come in the least exceptionable form. The 
use of ardent spirits might be reasonably 
expected to be less, in proportion as their 
price was greater ; and if not, an average 
duty and excise of twenty-seven cents 
on each gallon consumed in the union, 
would meet its current expenditure. I 
am not so extravagant as to suppose 
that any step of this kind can be expect- 
ed to be taken ; but, if it could, what 
discerning person would not say, that we 
saved the expense of a good government, 
from a charge whence it could well be spar- 



S9 

ed ? And that government so far-sighted to 
defend its institutions from foreign plots, 
might not its care be worthily bestowed, to 
shield them from this tremendous intestine 
foe °l It spoke the nation's sense, and won 
the nation's favour, when, not long ago, it 
declared to the world, that it would maintain 
the strand of this western continent sacred 
from the foot of every asserter of arbitrary 
rule ; but I verily believe, that, at that mo- 
ment and at this, our freedom was and is 
more endangered from the different quarter 
to which we have been looking. I do not 
say that the country would applaud more, 
but I am persuaded that it would have more 
reason to applaud, a determination which 
should be announced to it, to repel the dan- 
ger from this source. 

These are not considerations out of place 
here, because in a country where the citi- 
zens are the sovereign, whatever can be 
made to appear to them to be right, will, in 
the course of time, be law ; and I need not 



90 

say that where such a foe to religion, being 
a proper subject for legal restraints, thrives 
upon legal sufferance, the search of methods 
to drive it from that refuge, takes a place 
among religious inquiries. 

But to turn to other remedies capable of 
being applied by means of more managea- 
ble combinations. 

Great things, I doubt not, might be done, 
by the provision of some substitute for ar- 
dent spirits, which should possess their sup- 
posed quality to refresh, and should take their 
place as the customary offering of good will. 
This is by no means a hopeless project, and 
I greatly desire to see it tried. In France 
or Italy, I did not see an intoxicated person. 
It is not principle that restrains the people 
of those countries. They are by no means 
free from other sensuality, and transplanted 
to other parts of the world, the French, at 
least, are not seldom drunkards. It is not 
want or costliness of the means of intem- 
perance. The strong drink that deceives 



91 

<o many others, comes from the former 
kingdom, and the vineyards of Italy rear 
abundant temptation for other climes. But 
in those countries, men have not the same 
faith as in this, in the universal infallibility of 
ardent spirits, and custom has not made 
them the appropriate offering of hospitality, 
and therefore a relish for them is not form- 
ed. Friends repair together to houses of 
publick entertainment, which are everywhere 
open, as with us. But the substance, with 
which they habitually regale themselves, ex- 
cites without inebriating. The fact is a 
striking one ; and, as it seems to me, speaks 
direction and encouragement. We wonder 
at some of the vices of those nations. The 
most vicious of them would wonder no less 
at the intemperance of ours. Their pre- 
servative from it is equally at our command ; 
and when they have found a means of per- 
fectly temperate festivity, which satisfies 
them, in a like use, better than the hurtful 



92 

one in use among us, is it not worth the 
trial to have it adopted from them 9* 

* In Venice, there is a coffee-house which is said 
not to have been closed, day nor night, for a hundred 
and fifty years. This gives an idea of the demand 
there is for that refreshment. Establishments of the 
kind, — at many (I suppose, most) of which no liquor 
except coffee is furnished — are found exceedingly 
profitable, in Italy and France, being frequented for 
purposes of refreshment and sociability, in the same 
manner as our bar-rooms ; every one may judge 
how much less injuriously. I see no reason why they 
should not succeed among us. Drams are often re- 
sorted to for want of something better, by travellers, 
for instance, in cold weather, or by night, and since 
there would be found every thing to recommend the 
substitute, the fashion would be likely to spread. 
The light wines of those countries seem to have little 
power, if any, to disease the appetite. They are 
drunk to quench thirst for the most part, as milk 
would be. Nothing is more common than, at the lit- 
tle inns where one stops between one city and anoth- 
er, to see people of the labouring class drink part of 
a bottle of wine, largely diluted with water, and leave 
the rest, which they have paid for. I have heard it 
said, that when the French armies returned from the 
wars in Holland, they brought back a taste for dis- 
tilled liquor, as the English are reputed to have done 



93 

Again ; there is a great want of innocent 
publick amusements among us. We are 
told of a certain king, that he offered a 
prize for a new diversion. We should do 
well to follow his example, stipulating for 
one which should be harmless, and accessi- 
ble to the whole people. In other coun- 
tries, museums of antiquities and other 
curiosities, collections of natural history, 
galleries of statuary and pictures, and exten- 
sive and magnificent publick gardens, are 
places of universal holiday resort to a 

before, from the campaigns of the duke of Marlbo- 
rough. But if this were the case, it seems that 
the imported vice could not make a stand against 
the fixed habits of the nation. Certain it is, that 
one must have more than a visitor's opportunities of 
being acquainted with Paris, before one will see ex- 
hibitions of intemperance which are scarcely to be 
avoided in any English or American market town. 
Some successful specimens of light wine have been 
produced in this country, particularly at Vevay, in 
Indiana, by the colony of Swiss, and at Scupper- 
nong, in North Carolina. These are experiments 
which deserve attention. 



94 

crowded, but perfectly orderly, because 
temperate population. Some governments, 
from motives of policy, are at much pains 
to recommend these recreations, and make 
their subjects happy by them ; and the con- 
sequence is, that though greatly behind our 
population in almost all respects, they great- 
ly excel it in some natural, gentle, and re- 
fining tastes. They think not of the appe- 
tite of thirst in connexion with their holiday 
pleasures. They love no riot. They will 
tolerate none. — It is hard to imagine any 
way in which such provision is ever to be 
made among us, but certain it is, that we 
are suffering for the want of it. Of a por- 
tion of our people, as of the hardy moun- 
taineers, whom we resemble not a little in 
good and bad, it might be said by a like 
severe observer ; 

* Unknown to them, when sensual pleasures cloy, 
1 To fill the languid pause with finer joy. 



95 

* In wild excess the vulgar breast takes fire, 
1 Till, buried in debauch, the bliss expire.'* 

There is an institution of recent inven- 
tion, which has done much, I doubt not, 
and may be made to do more, for the sup- 
pression of intemperance. I speak of the 

* I do not know whether I have here said any 
thing" liable to misconception. Nobody, I suppose, 
will understand me, as expressing approbation of 
many of the publick amusements of the continent of 
Europe, though even as to these he would be hardly 
tasked, who should undertake to maintain that they 
lead to more evil than the sottishness, in whose place 
they stand. I am not even insensible to the fo ce of 
much that may be said against the moral tendency of 
exhibitions in the fine arts. Part of this ground, 
however, is not debateable. Publick walks, and col- 
lections of natural curiosities, afford relaxation which 
is nothing but harmless and improving. Let any one 
compare the scene at the botanick garden in Paris, or 
the gardens of the Grand Duke at Florence on some fes- 
tival day, with that displayed on similar occasions on 
our common, and he will find he must have recourse to 
other considerations to sustain his pride of country. 
This latter exhibition is a scandal which I can scarcely 
doubt the city government would be borne out by 



96 

savings banks. The individuals who have 
established them in our towns, and taken 
care to have them attached to the large 
manufacturing establishments in the country, 

the publick sense in removing, the land thus violat- 
ed, and the credit thus lost, being both the communi- 
ty's property. 

This may seem a strange connexion, in which to 
introduce the subject of publick executions, but it is 
brought to my mind by a paragraph in one of the 
papers of the day, in which I am writing this note. 
It contains an account of a recent execution for 
murder at Raleigh, in North Carolina. ' There were 
individuals,' says the writer, ' in such a beastly state of 
intoxication, that not even this horrid spectacle could 
sober them.' The sentence might, I fear, be inserted 
in every such account. A pubiick execution is an 
occasion of strong excitement to the spectators, and 
there are but too many, in whose minds excitement 
and recourse to liquor are indissolubly associated. 
This subject of publick executions, or, I will even 
say, of collecting crowds on any publick occasion, 
when it maybe avoided, is a subject entitled to much 
more serious attention than it has hitherto received. 

To return to the provision of agreeable employ- 
ment for those seasons of leisure, which are other- 
wise likely to be employed in drinking The condition 
of our people seems to me to offer, in one particular, 



97 

are publick benefactors worthy of cordial 
praise. I mention them particularly here, 
in order to express my conviction, that 
every householder, and other person who 

a plain direction. With us every body can read, and 
a taste for reading, such as is generally possessed 
among us, to a certain extent, affords a never-fail- 
ing resource for the agreeable occupation of time, 
Pains ought to be taken to cultivate and gratify 
this taste. I look upon the social libraries, establish- 
ed in many of our country towns, as an excellent 
preservative against intemperance, when proper care 
is taken to furnish them with entertaining and in- 
structive books. With our long winters, our agricul- 
tural population find a great deal of time hanging 
heavy on their hands, and many resort to the tavern 
to while it away, who would not do it, if they could, 
in any better way, find agreeable excitement for their 
minds. I think it, therefore, to be greatly desirable, 
that large collections of improving and amusing 
books shonld be provided in every village, for the 
general use. All private and domestick virtues 
would find a new aid in such establishments. I ven- 
ture to propose something further. To meet, in a 
safe way, the demands of the social principle, and of 
the taste for news, both which have a place among 
impulses towards the tavern, why might not a read- 
I 



98 



employs labourers, may do important good, 
in the connexion of our subject, by making 
known to his dependants the existence of 
such institutions. A person who has little 
money at a time, is tempted to part with it 
for an idle indulgence, because he knows of 
no way to dispose of a small sum to advan- 
tage ; and to inform him of such a way is 
to save much more than his money to him. 
Should there be such a person present, let 
me say to him, that if he is in the habit of 
spending eight cents a day in ardent spirits, 
and will discontinue that practice, to deposit 
the amount thus redeemed, in the savings 

ing room be established in each town, in some cen- 
tral place, (not a licensed house,) where the gazettes 
and other vehicles of news might be found, and 
neighbours might hold their consultations. I can see 
no serious difficulty in the way of such institutions, 
and it seems to me they would promise much good. 
May I ask magistrates, ministers, or other publick 
spirited citizens whose eye this suggestion may 
meet, to give it some consideration ? I suspect that, 
in cities, Insurance Offices, in this way, answer a 
purpose, which, if they did not exist, taverns, with 
all their dangers, would have to serve. 



99 



bank, lie may in twenty years be master 
from this source, of nearly a thousand, and in 
thirty years, of nearly two thousand dollars. 
How few labouring men are there, who do 
not daily spend diat sum in this use, and 
what a difference it would make to the 
comfort of their age, to have its proceeds 
at their command, to say nothing of the 
health, good temper, and good character 
they will have added to their purchase. 

Much may be done, and has been done, 
by voluntary combinations of persons engag- 
ing together to remonstrate with, and when 
necesoary, to prosecute offenders against the 
laws already provided in the case in ques- 
tion ; to discountenance and check intempe- 
rance, as far as may be, by their authority, 
example and influence ; to collect and circu- 
late facts relating to the subject, and, by 
whatever means occur, to exert a joint action 
on publick opinion, that agent which now 
manages the world. The Massachusetts 
Society for suppressing Intemperance, insti- 
tuted fifteen years ago, has laboured well in 



100 

that field. To its often disappointed, but 
persevering and efficient labours, the anxiety 
with which the community now regards the 
subject is in great part to be ascribed. It 
deserves the help of the able ; the generosi- 
ty of the benevolent ; and the prayers of all. 
Several of its branches have also done good 
service. I will specify the case of one in 
the town of Yarmouth. Ten years ago 
some leading persons of that enterprising 
place had taken alarm at the extent, to which 
habits of excess were spreading among their 
neighbours. They found, as they complain- 
ed, that ' they could not trust their seamen. 5 
Four individuals met to take counsel together 
in the emergency, and began a reformation 
by pledging themselves to one another totally 
to abstain from ardent spirits themselves, and 
not offer them to their labourers, nor to any 
other inhabitant of the town. Nine or ten 
individuals before long formed a society, 
which in its first report was able to give it as 
'their confident opinion, that not one quarter 



101 

of the spirituous liqtior had been used 
in their town in that year, which had been 
used in the years preceding. 5 All the re- 
tailers of ardent spirits gave up the business, 
and took an active part in the reform. The 
society, under the original compact of absti- 
nence, now consists of a hundred of the most 
respectable citizens, fifteen of whom have 
acknowledged themselves to have stood be- 
fore on most dangerous ground. Their 
vessels make long fishing voyages without 
distilled liquor on board, and the effect, in 
short, is that intemperance is almost banished 
from the place. Such an instance is a 
trumpet tongue of encouragement. 

Other combinations less formal and less 
permanent have done their measure of good. 
Several towns in the neighbourhood of Yar- 
mouth, have in town meeting, instructed their 
selectmen to recommend no retailers for li- 
censes, and but one or two innholders. In those 
assemblies presided the old virtue of the pil- 
grims. In Cohasset, twelve or thirteen licensed 



102 

householders have of late, by agreement to- 
gether, given up their privilege. The ex- 
ample of conspicuous bodies of men at their 
publick meetings, in excluding spirituous 
liquors, has had its good influence, which 
may most advantageously be further used. 
The denominations of Methodists and 
Friends have adopted ecclesiastical regula- 
tions, which in those well organized bodies 
are effective checks. 

Individuals have a work to do ; some- 
times by means of particular advantages. 
The jurist, for instance, has a task in a strict 
administration, and, if the way may be found, 
an improvement of the laws relative to crim- 
inal indulgence. The divine, in publick 
and in private, needs to expose it in its char- 
acter of an awful dereliction of the law of 
God, and suicide of the soul ; and the phy- 
sician too, from the press and in the family, 
is called on to make known its terrifick 
effects upon the system, and to explain what 
habits of constitution, employment and diet 



103 

tend to, and what oppose it.* This is a kind 
of explanation particularly wanted. Full ex- 
periment of landholders authorizes me to 
say, that, besides serving their own interest, 
they may prove essentially useful to the la- 
bourers they employ, by stipulating to give 
them higher wages, and, on that considera- 
tion, to withhold all supply of ardent spirits, 
on whatever occasion or pretence. They who 
would drink immoderately, thinking that what 
they should leave would be gain to their 
employers and loss to themselves, will be com- 
paratively temperate, unless already addict- 
ed to the vice, when they know that they 
must be the poorer for what they consume. f 

* An excellent service would be rendered to the 
cause by medical gentlemen and town officers under- 
taking to ascertain and publish, from year to year, 
the number of persons who die and become paupers 
through intemperance. 

t A friend informs me, that in expending- forty 
thousand dollars upon the large manufacturing estab- 
lishment at Uxbridge, he has used among his work- 
men only five or six hogsheads of spirits, and this 



104 

To secure ardent spirits, in fine, from intem- 
perate use, the method seems to me no other 
than to drive them absolutely from common 
use ; and therefore, without undertaking to 
say what is every one's duty, I am sure 

chiefly among- those employed in ditching-. The 
quantity thus named seems not small ; but it is 
trifling, in proportion to the amount of labour requis- 
ite to earn such a sum. He gives his labourers ad- 
vanced wages on a stipulation of total abstinence from 
distilled spirits, which condition violated in a single 
instance, he parts with them. Their drink is molasses 
and water ; and his experience of their peaceableness 
among themselves, and better service of his interests 
with a perfectly temperate diet, has led him to the 
resolution henceforward to employ no labourer, on 
any terms whatever, except with this restriction. 
Other similar experiments with a similar result are 
within my knowledge, and I know of none to contra- 
dict them. Let us be warned by the wretched condi- 
tion of the manufacturing population of England, and 
let measures be seasonably taken to avert it from ours. 
I scarcely need say that I have here only at- 
tempted to indicate a few of the most direct methods 
of precaution against the vice in question. Every 
thing which tends to promote industrious and orderly 
habits, to furnish useful occupation to the mind, above 



105 

that every one will be in the way of doing 
great good, who will resolve not to keep, 
never to offer, and never to accept them, 
except when professionally prescribed, thus 
causing his ' moderation to be known unto 
all men,' and by his conduct calling their 
attention to the subject. This is the spirit 
of the apostle's resolution in our text, in ad- 
ducing which, I did not think it necessary to 
detain you with any illustration of its coinci- 
dence with that spirit of considerate, self- 
denying charity which is the favourite grace 

all to bring it under religious influences, has a high 
importance in this view. The libraries for appren- 
tices, and scientifick lectures for young mechanicks, 
which have lately been set on foot in this city , are 
excellent moral instruments. The commonwealth is 
likely to make no better single provisions against in- 
temperance than those which enforce the support of 
common schools and publick worship. Our prima- 
ry schools in this city do good service in withdrawing 
many young children from the constant bad example 
of vicious parents, but the system needs to be com- 
pleted by the establishment of infant schools, on a 
plan of recent invention which is producing excellent 
fruits in the parent country. 



106 

of the gospel. I will undertake to say fur- 
ther, that the young, who have no plea to 
make of habits formed, and so backward to 
relinquish their indulgence, however tempe- 
rate, — I will say, that the young should resolve 
absolutely to abstain from ardent spirits. They 
will not then, it is true, be sure of being 
temperate. They may use the vinous and 
other liquors to a criminal excess ; but it is 
distilled spirits, that experience has proved 
to have the peculiar power to steal away the 
resolution while they win the taste, and in 
the purpose to renounce them the greatest 
danger will have been escaped. 

Once more ; effectually to check this, 
like every other moral evil, we must faith- 
fully do what in us lies, by inculcation and 
example, to spread the sanctifying influences 
of the gospel of Christ ; of that pure and 
heavenly spirit which can hold no fellowship 
with any sensuality, — which separates itself 
from the pollutions of the world, as the crys- 
tal's solid light takes no stain from the mire of 



107 

the cavern where it is buried. Address then, 
brethren, to the objects of your solicitude, 
the warnings and entreaties of your Saviour's 
religion. There is the sovereign antidote 
for every moral bane. With the affection- 
ate apostle, let the language of your life and 
of your conduct to them be, ' dearly be- 
loved, we beseech you, as strangers and pil- 
grims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war 
against the soul. 5 Make them feel the earn- 
estness of that entreaty ; the reality of that 
character ; the solemnity of that truth. 
Help them, as you may, to attain that spiritu- 
ality of mind, which alone can be relied on 
as a complete safeguard against disorders of 
the life. Quicken them to a devout love of 
God, so that whether they eat or drink, or 
whatsoever they do, they may never be re- 
gardless of glorifying him. Excite them to a 
holy love of Jesus, that they may aim, like 
him, to be ' harmless, undefiled, and separate 
from sinners. 5 ' Walk in the spirit, and ye 
shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. 5 There is 



108 

our path of safety. There we shall walk un- 
harmed, however example or viler influences 
should entice, or treacherous opportunity 
beguile. A heart purified by religion is the 
citadel of unconquerable strength against all 
assaults of evil. My friends, labour to cre- 
ate in others that purity of heart, and to that 
end cherish it in yourselves, with watchful- 
ness and prayer. Let others see how holy 
in all manner of conversation the faith of 
Christ has made you, and by that appeal 
win them to embrace it and live by it. When 
you and all others are engaged in communi- 
cating its blessed spirit, there will exist no 
evils to deplore, like that which now sum- 
mons us, each and all, to strenuous effort. 

I have said nothing of methods of recovery 
of persons already involved in intemperate 
habits. They are not to be abandoned. But 
my only hope that their reformation will in 
any considerable number of cases be effected, 
Tests on the report which most of us have 
heard, that & physician has discovered some 



109 

preparation which, administered, will make 
the patient forever after nauseate ardent 
spirits. If this be true, let us forthwith de- 
cree festivals and erect statues to him. Our 
testimonials of publick gratitude to such a 
benefactor can scarcely be too cordial or too 
costly. He is far more worthy of the high- 
est honours from us, than were those cham- 
pions who, in ancient times, were deified for 
their services in ridding a country of mon- 
sters. 

In presuming to suggest remedies, my 
friends, I have by no means overlooked or 
underrated the difficulties of the case. But 
I also remember, that difficulties are the in- 
stituted occasion in the order of providence 
for calling out great wisdom and vigour. I 
call to mind words of the first president of 
that society to which I have referred as suc- 
cessfully labouring in this cause ;* a great 
-and good man, whose devotions were used 

* The late honourable Samuel Dexter. 

K 



110 

to ascend here with yours for a divine bless- 
ing on all good counsels and all just works, 
and whose heart, I doubt not, was often 
warmed with yours by the breathings of love 
to God and man which then fell here from 
most persuasive lips. He had this cause 
much at heart. His large and earnest mind 
counted the obstacles, but it was the better 
to meet them. ' As the object is good,' 
said he, i so it is practicable.' I love to re- 
peat that saying. The object is good ; there- 
fore it is practicable. It is an enterprize 
against that which is, by eminence, the mis- 
fortune, the danger of our beloved country ; 
the blot on the fair works of God among us ; 
the weapon of the prince of darkness. It 
has a right then to the services of every pru- 
dent man, every patriotick citizen, every 
disciple of Christ ; and it asks the benefit of 
no other services than those, effectually to 
maintain itself. I desire more and more to 
realize, — for it is a truth which all religion 
establishes, and all future experience is to 



Ill 

seal, — that under the government of a God 
who hath pleasure in righteousness and fa- 
vour for its toils, single-minded men need 
no other omen for the conquest, in due time, 
over any difficulties, than the omen of a 
good CAUSE. 



ERRATUM. 



Page 107 — line 6, for life read lips. 



f-@> 






-^ 






